Introduction: Existential Anxiety is one of the most important emotions that play a significant role in different periods of development and most importantly to adulthood and elderly. The Main purpose of the present study was assessing psychometric properties of the Persian version of the Existential Anxiety Questionnaire for The elderly.
Method: This study was a psychological study that was conducted on 161 elderly in Shiraz. Data collection tools were The Existential Anxiety Questionnaire (EAQ), existential anxiety scale (Good & Good, 1974) and Aronson-Woods Spirituality/Religiousness Index (IW) that after translation-back The Existential Anxiety Questionnaire (EAQ), Convergent-divergent validity, confirmatory factor analysis and internal consistency reliability was obtained. A convenience sample was used to collect data and data were analyzed by SPSS-22 and Amoss.
Results: Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) confirms three factors of emptiness –meaninglessness, guilt-condemnation and fate-death. Goodness of fit index (GFI) was satisfactory (after using modification index). Also for verification of convergent-divergent validity, EAQ correlated significantly with Existential anxiety scale (EAS) and Aronson-Woods Spirituality/Religiousness Index (IW). Furthermore, Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was 0/51,0/41 and 0/51 for meaninglessness, guilt-condemnation and fate-death, respectively.
Conclusion: This research provides promising evidence about the psychometric properties of the Persian version of the Existential Anxiety Questionnaire (EAQ) in Iranian older people and elderly. This questionnaire can be used to collect information in research and measure the death anxiety in psychotherapy.